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“Each time you loot money from an enemy, an extra 5% money is generated and deposited directly into your guild bank.”

I can’t be the only one who thinks that this gives guild leaders license to anally abuse every single guild member without even dropping his pants. 5% isn’t a huge amount, but when you have 100 members (or more) all depositing a trickle of gold into the bank each day, it can stack relatively quickly. Insert unadulterated and entirely inaccurate napkin math below.

Total Cataclysm Quests Available: 150+115+125+108+95 (numbers pulled from loremaster achievement from each zone) = 593Plus a ton of daily quests.

Now imagine that two thirds of all of these quests require you to kill mobs (for drops or for slay counts). Each one on average 8 mobs (napkin!)?

400 (or so) quests.
3200 mobs killed.

That can give you anywhere from 640 gold to 2880 gold (using lower cap of 20s per mob, upper cap of 90s per mob).

5% of that can be anywhere between 32 gold and 144 gold per person leveling (approximately) from 80 to 85. A hundred of those means anywhere up to about 14k gold sitting in a guild bank. Don’t forget that this then doubles with Cash Flow (Rank 2) at guild level 16.

Maybe I’m being melodramatic, but most guild leaders aren’t stupid, they’re going to notice a few hundred gold trickling into their guild vaults every day, and nobody’s going to see exactly how much they’ve deposited because it doesn’t show in the guild bank log. Most guilds also operate a policy of not giving free repairs to new members, or even only to officers. When you’re running a tight ship like that then where does the gold go?

Oh hi guildmaster, I didn’t see you there behind your armor crafted from Truegold and unicorn cunts.

Cliche is a new raiding guild created by a real life friend that I’ve decided to realm and faction change to join, it’s actually pretty exciting, we raid on two days (four hour raids) as a ten man group, and in the two raids I’ve been to I’ve already seen the difference. No more having to co-ordinate twenty five people with flasks and enchants, the people we have are trusted, smart and generally good at what they do. We did ICC10 today, had a handful of good attempts at the Lich King (3%, gutted!) and generally had a lot of fun. I’ve finally got my two first characters (Priest and Paladin) on the same realm, which is nice, although it means I had to leave Mist behind.

Not that it’s the same as it used to be. The officers don’t care anymore, the guild leader is AFK most of the time, the second in command is an arrogant idiot who refuses to admit that despite having a problem, there are solutions, and the other five officers don’t actually do anything at all. Whining asides, it’s nice to have a clean sheet, and as soon as we have the Lich King on farm, we’ll start doing some ten man progression. Played Shadow for all of today because we lacked a decent ranged DPS and had too many decent healers, no loot and a lot of repairs, but worth every gold for the fun I got in return. I just hope that blasted Warlock doesn’t outroll me on all of the Cloth gear.

When I come to Orgrimmar knowing that I’ll have to wait twenty minutes for a Hearthstone or run/fly back which’ll take just as bloody long, I wouldn’t mind if you throw me a few gold for the trouble, especially when I’m doing something that clearly benefits you.

Now by no means am I a roleplayer, nor would I claim to have ever done it beyond a few /emotes in chat, but there are things that I define as “good roleplay” and things I define as “bad roleplay”

Bear in mind that we’re playing a game who’s theme is war, death, destruction, and huge battles. One would have thought that roleplay would stretch a little further than simply standing in Thunder Bluff or Orgrimmar (or Silvermoon, god forbid) pretending to talk to other random players under a very transparent alias, an alias that they can’t keep in tune for more than few lines before they make a very uncharacteristic jolt into a fit of undeniably see through rage or some other emotion.

I wanted to write this recently but lost the will to because I know that I just don’t have enough to talk about in regards to roleplaying to make a decent blog post. That changed today after I see what was probably the most pathetic attempt at roleplay ever. Two Tauren and a Blood Elf in Orgrimmar having what seemed like the most cliche conversation ever. Tauren A and Tauren B were a couple (I assume), and Tauren B was caught having “fun” with Blood Elf, so Tauren A started screaming in the middle of Orgrimmar about how it was over and that they would pick up their “shit” next week, after they’d moved to Thunder Bluff. The whole time this conversation was transpiring, my jaw was dropping lower and lower. Then, as then uncharacteristic twist, Tauren A suddenly starts shouting death threats and using language that you’d expect from the Lich King, not some vulnerable Tauren wife.

Perhaps I’m sitting under a cloud of grandeur, but my definition of role playing is rolling a dice, having epic battles with monsters and other people, blood spilling and none of this lovey-Eastenders shit that plagues the open air of Orgrimmar and other cities. We’re playing a game with in-game miles of maps, more towns than just the cosy Auction House of Silvermoon, huge factional wars with ten (soon to be twelve) different races and whatever else. On a whole realm there have to be more than just a few solitary Blood Elves and Tauren playing (un)happy families, enough people to gather up a small army to go raiding towns and enemy cities. Yes, we have that already, we have city raids whereby we kill faction leaders, but what about something else? Why don’t you go browse Wowhead, find a random NPC and make up a storyline to have an excuse to kill him. Juli Stormkettle is the Ironforge Mage trainer, perhaps he’s wanted by the Horde War Chief for practicing black magic with fatal consequences. There, in the space of a sentence I’ve set up a storyline whereby you have the means and opportunity to go and do something with a group of people instead of sitting around Silvermoon as a level 7 Rogue making love to another level 7 Rogue.

The game has constraints, yes, things like city raiding and dungeon running are hard to do at lower levels, but it also provides a thousand opportunities. Every quest can be role played, you can pretend to be Mankrik’s best friend, going to avenge his beaten wife by desecrating the Razorfen dens, you can pretend to be Thrall’s elite guard, on a mission to explore Northrend, anything at all with a bit of imagination.

What I don’t understand is that people set up backstories for characters, you’re a dragon who fought alongside Rhonin and Krasus, you were lined up to be consort of one of the Aspects, hours of imagination are put into this, and then it’s all ruined by being tied to a level 7 Rogue who does sweet fuck all.

I don’t really understand why I’m irked, but I play on a roleplaying realm (not really my choice, I just moved there to be with a friendly face) and seeing this stuff just makes me want to facepalm. If people enjoy sitting around Silvermoon and Orgrimmar having sexy ERPs and affairs then go ahead, I just get the feeling there is so much more to it.

Faith mentioned something to me yesterday that I’m not sure is a good or bad thing, at least not until I test it. Holy Paladins are probably the least squishy healer out there just because they have: plate armor; shields; a tank-based sub-spec. Even completely unbuffed my armor can mitigate 60% of all incoming physical damage, avoid 14% of it through defenses and cast a variety of bubbles on myself to reduce or entirely mitigate anything left. The only place they seem to fall down is magic damage, and being a Blood Elf, I have a 2% gain over any other Alliance Paladins right off the bat.

But I won’t ramble too much about defense, I’m a healer, not a tank. What I will talk about though, is the Divine Sacrifice Paladin, a Paladin who ventures 17 points into the Protection Tree to pick up Divine Sacrifice (redirect 30% of all damage to the party onto the Paladin) and Divine Guardian (provides a 20% shield wall to all raid members for 6 seconds). So you’re giving a 50% reduction to your whole party (usually all healers together, though as a Paladin you should probably be in with the tanks for this very ability) and a 20% reduction to the whole raid. If you’re expecting a 10k*25 hit on your group, this ability alone can mitigate 50k damage in a single GCD. Of course, you’ll also be taking 8k+(30% of 8k * 4)22.4k damage from the AoE itself plus the redirects, so this skill is pretty much bound to Divine Protection or Divine Shield, lest you get yourself deaded. However, in order to pick up Divine Guardian, you’re going to need 3 points in Improved Righteous Fury (6% damage reduction for all incoming damage), so that figure will shrink once again, and then, right at the bottom of the list on the RNG you could even go so far as to pick up Blessed Life for a potential (10% chance) of reducing the damage of a single hit (though each hit is rolled separately, so you might get all or you might get none!) by 50%!

So musing rambles asides, I was seriously looking at the idea of getting Blessed Life for the 10% chance of a half damage hit. In places like ICC where raid damage is usually significant I can see this being quite a good thing to take, the only problem is I need to pull 3 points from somewhere else. Oh, I know, from the Protection tree.

Why am I so anal on being a good damage sponge, anyway? Well, with Mist being heavy on Resto Shamans, I’m going to almost always be able to expect a Mana Spring totem down, and by default all Resto Shamans (should) have the improved version of this, providing it with a further 20% extra healing which is the same as our Improved Blessing of Wisdom. Because the Shaman talent is mandatory, and our talent is only optional, I can afford to skip on this talent for any raid that has a Resto Shaman in it. So now I have two spare points, both of which I point into the next talent over, Blessed Hands. Now I know it’s not my job to watch the threat of DPS, but giving a DPS of my choice a 40% threat reduction/removal over 10 seconds (probably Runningwater and his Swipe happy playstyle) is rather nice, but more importantly, being able to give a tank a 40% shield wall for as long as it takes them to absorb 30k damage on a single GCD seems unfoundedly useful. Maybe. On the other hand, because this is always capped at 30k damage (my ICC25 buffed HP as the caster), I can’t help but wonder if it’d be better to absorb that 30k over a long (untalented) or short (talented) period of time. A lot of care has to be taken here too, because a tank taking two big hits in a row could leave me with half of my HP wiped out, which is where things like Divine Protection and Improved Righteous Fury come in.

Holy Paladins are tank healers, yes, but that’s only one of their two niches. Their other niche is raid utility. We have Blessings, we have Hands, we have Aura Mastery, a ton of raid-wide skills that might make or break a hard mode, and I can’t help but think that any Holy Paladin who puts their spare 17-20 points into Retribution probably have a lot to answer for in terms of why they’re being lazy and aiming to crit high for the sake of the meters than make the life of the other 24 players that little bit less taxing. The reason I’m going for these changes is because I’m pulling talent points out of places that they were otherwise wasted. Improved Blessing of Wisdom? Same as the mandatory Shaman talent in the Restoration tree. Improved Devotion Aura? Same as the mandatory talent in the Protection tree for tanks and the Restoration tree for Druids. A lot of the talents in my build can be done the same or better by other players, which means that rather than create duplicate effects, I might as well go for something unique that no other player or class can do, like my 20% raid-wide shield wall or my 40% single target sacrifices.

Am I the only person who thinks that this is a welcome change? There are two things regarding RealID, the first being the usage ingame that allows me to talk to people regardless of which realm, faction or character I’m playing, and the second being the change on the Blizzard forums whereby all posts will be submitted using the person’s first and last names. Now to me, I’m more than happy to admit that my name is Jake Winters and that I live in the UK and am a University student studying Business and Law at De Montfort University, who uses the online alia of Astarael, Arcticious, ArcticTerrorist, Squiglet, etc. Go find me, I don’t care.

People argue that employers might google their name and find out that they play WoW, so what? You play it in your private time, no employer should discriminate on the basis of a game as long as it doesn’t interfere with your working life, and you only need to worry if you’re so scrubby that your references all say “only turns up to work half of the time, mysteriously ill the other half and plays WoW a lot”. The majority of people have names so common that you could google it and spend six hours finding everybody except the person you’re looking for. Think about it, how big headed must you be to think that people would go around googling you for fun. You’re a person, there’s six and a half billion others on the planet, get off your perch and stop thinking that just because you make a post, all 11 million WoW players are suddenly going to come banging on your door and sending you anonymous phonecalls. Seriously.

MMO-Champion won’t make a similar change because it’s “bad”. The only bad thing about it is that it might lead to a few hours of downtime, the good thing about it outweighing that tremendously in that the forums might actually see a decent post once in a wee while, rather than every other thread being a troll or flamer or god knows what other forum buzz words are used in regards to users.

I have to admit that I don’t use the Blizzard forums, and I rarely post on the MMO-Champion forums, but the reason for that is the reason that RealID is trying to diminish, there’s just no point trying to find a decent post in a haystack of shit.

Ranting asides, I’ve found myself on The Sha’tar again playing my Holy Paladin, and absolutely loving it. I feel inspired to play once again and I’m hopefully joining Mist again, something that I regret ever leaving dare I say. It’s one of the few (probably the only, now) place I felt like my voice was loud enough to be worth hearing, and the only place where I could be given the honest truth about my performance, rather than sugar coated and ignored (good or bad). Of course, that was a year ago (last June-September), things might be different now but I doubt it, Faith is still the guild leader (me and Faith made the best Holy Paladin duo), and Runningwater is an officer (good choice as far as my opinion is worth), so it’s twice as awesome as it was before.

I spent the last week doing dailies, playing AH and farming to get my Paladin’s epic mount (something I’d neglected to do for many months). I even had the Argent Tourney mount (150 Champion’s Seals back when I did the 7 Tourney dailies per day during 3.2) that I couldn’t use until I got epic flying, and now I can flap around Dalaran on my white and gold hippogryph thinking “vroom”. I also took the time to level a farming character, or at least level a Death Knight’s professions up to Outlands standards (he’s only 59 at the minute, I started him two days ago so he’s a work in progress). He farmed the majority of the Azerothian ore required to turn my Paladin into an Engineer, something which he is now a proud Grand Master at, with 340 Haste enchanted gloves and Nitro Boots to show for it. These two enchants were the primary reason for the change, I must say. Divine Plea in its current capacity is a 60 second CD that gives 25% mana back over 15 seconds at the cost of reducing all healing via spells done by half. The Engineering glove enchants are a 12 second CD that gives 11% haste over 12 seconds on a 60 second CD. The result? Offsetting my rather poor healing output for this 15 seconds every 60 by boosting my haste considerably, and gives me another CD to play with in terms of output boosting.

Four ways to offset my healing output during Divine Plea moments. Given that Illumination and Avenging are both on a 3 minute CD, having four minutes of boosted healing in a three minute window seems a little unusual, but ignoring the above musings and only taking the first three options listed, if I cycle Avenging Wrath, Illumination and Talisman of Resurgence, it means I (once again) free up my Sacrifices for more important raid damage moments, rather than binding them to Divine Plea to stop myself being kicked in the cunt. After all, the last thing you need to do is pop Divine Plea + Gloves + Divine Shield + Divine/Hand of Sacrifice during a moment where healing is going to be absolutely needed, and sure the 20% raid-wide shield wall will be beautiful for mitigation, but surely a 20% shield wall with no healing offset would be far more useful. For that reason, it’s probably best to just keep the Sacrifices off CD until needed, rather than binding to Divine Plea. Or, I could bind Hand of Sacrifice with Talisman of Resurgence (which seems a bit weak on its own) since it’s the weakest of the three options, and it still leaves my most powerful CD untouched for those burst damage phases. With a 25% buff in ICC, I certainly have enough HP to suck up 30% of a tank’s incoming damage for a few seconds, because chances are I’ll Sacrifice my Beacon target and simply heal myself for the duration of the Sacrifice, which should be easy enough even without the use of Divine Protection (the Forbearance CD being saved for Divine Sacrifice later on).

Enough musing, though I’m sure this might be of interest to Sheepless (though I heard he’s one of those very naughty Holy/Retribution crit stackers!), I’m feeling great about playing a Paladin again, and now that I’ve got the hard part (well, I think that the hardest part of Paladin play is the mana management and healing reductions) nailed down, I should be able to heal just as well as Faith. Except without the 277 gear. And Val’anyr. God I want a Val’anyr.